Brooklyn Crime Novel
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by: Boston Globe * New Yorker * NPR * PopMatters
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn comes a sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing more than fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood.
“A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime 'time'? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.” — Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name.
The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.
Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, “one of America’s greatest storytellers” (Washington Post), has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we’ve made.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The parts are better than the whole in Lethem's textured if scattershot latest (after The Arrest), an episodic look at crime in a Brooklyn neighborhood from the 1930s through 2019. The first chapter, "Quarters, Part 1," set in 1978, features two 14-year-old Boerum Hill white boys using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces, creating "surrealist anti-money." Their story line is only resolved hundreds of pages later, after diversions involving a panoply of characters, including one known as "the Screamer" and another called "the Black kid" or "C." There are vivid vignettes, such as "Ice Cream Truck, Known Con-Artist," wherein a child who's just bought ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck witnesses a daylight sidewalk shooting in 1979; and "Guy Who Stuffs Flyers into His Bag and Says Keep Walking," in which a 20-something man from Brooklyn tries to make it as a bookseller in 1991 Manhattan, where he's surprised when a younger man approaches him on the street and doesn't try to mug him. Near the halfway point, Lethem jokes he may have lost his audience along the convoluted paths he's created; the narrator, whose identity is withheld, asks, "Anyone still reading...?" It's a bit too meandering, but fans will be pleased to find Lethem still knows his way around a New York City street scene.
